4: Breaking
...
It's days before she sees him again. It's the longest they've ever gone since the visits began and she worries.
When he finally appears, it's obvious he doesn't want to.
He's sitting on his bunk, head in black-gloved hands, and he jumps when she appears. His face is tear-streaked.
She reaches for him and he leans away.
"I can't," he says, and if she has any hope that the fact she hasn't seen him in four days is a coincidence, it's dashed when he abruptly cuts off their connection and she's suddenly staring at a blank wall in the kitchen.
She hadn't known he'd figured out how to control it, how to shut her out.
...
She reaches out to him across the bridge a few times a day, testing the waters and trying to gauge his mental state, his emotions. She's worried about him, about them. She doesn't know what happened, what went wrong, what he's thinking. She only knows she's worried and he's not talking.
His shields are always up and iron-strong.
...
What if they were on the same side?
He reaches for her again in a moment of weakness, of selfishness. He finds her asleep on her bunk, curled in around herself. She stirs when he touches her cheek, but there's no alarm or surprise in her face when she opens her eyes.
There's a lot she's wanted to say, but she can't remember any of it, and so she settles for silently reaching for his gloved hand.
He knows everything she wants to say anyway, she figures. He must.
"Ben," she starts, and his face contorts in pain before he can get himself under control or, at the very least, make it look like he had.
He feels things more strongly, more intensely than anyone she's ever known before.
"Don't call me that." He says, his voice raspy and harsh. "That's not my name anymore."
"But you're still the same person," she says, sitting up. He shifts backwards to accommodate her. "You're still in there somewhere. I know it."
She reaches for him slowly, carefully. Her hand goes to his face; her thumb traces the scar she left, deep and red, cracking his right cheek open like a bolt of lightning. He watches her, wary and apprehensive, tracking her every movement, but he still startles when she touches him, like the fact that she's touching him — wants to touch him — is surprising.
"Why won't you let me in?" She asks.
"You're already inside me," is the answer she receives, bitten short and packed with impact and implication.
...
He's like a ghost hovering on the edge of her periphery, always letting her glimpse him but never see him fully. He's hiding from her and maybe from himself too, but losing both wars.
I feel it again. The call to the Light.
This time, he doesn't have anyone to pray to anymore. He's pushed himself further and further into the Dark, looking for his place in it all, but all he's found there is torment and bitterness, and he feels farther from his goal, from his idol Vader, than ever. Whenever he tries to speak into the emptiness, into the void, she's the one who comes to his mind.
And so he prays. At first to the Darkness, but then eventually to her.
He prays for her to stop pulling.
She hears him from across the emptiness, from across the void, and she wants so desperately to tell him the same thing he told her once.
It's okay. I feel it too.
She believes, knows he'll come to her when it's time.
...
The bridge starts wearing down without use, stretching taut and thin, weakening the connection bit by bit, hour by hour they don't speak.
She starts feeling like she's underwater; everything around her is muted, moving slowly as if through a thick syrup. And still she waits.
...
He finds he can't escape her any more now than he could at the start. She's in the silence of his quarters, in the preoccupied chatter of the bridge, in the darkness of the galaxies outside, in the light of the stars he watches at the window. She's the beginning and end, his beginning and end.
...
His defenses are down when he sleeps and she can slip through the cracks of his armor to him. He's a restless sleeper, tormented by his own mind in dreams and reality alike, and she can't touch him for fear it'll wake him. But she sits there with him in the darkness and hopes maybe her presence lends him some peace, even if he won't know she's been there in the morning.
She waits for him to give in. Maybe not to the Light, not yet, but at least to her.
He doesn't catch her the first few times, but around the sixth, his eyes open.
He doesn't say anything. He just gives her one of those looks that let her know he's thinking something, even if she doesn't know what it is, and then he turns away from her and faces the wall of his quarters.
He doesn't cut off the connection though. And she thinks maybe this is telling, maybe it's a sign. They're still in this silence, unmoving, not speaking, barely even breathing.
When he finally goes back to sleep, it's peaceful.
...
The next day, she finds him alone, with tears on his face, holding his lightsaber, stooped and hunched and broken.
She has no context for it. She's felt their bond weakening slowly but surely, tearing at the seams, taking pieces of her with it, and she hasn't felt him all day. She goes to him immediately, reaches for him, but he jerks away and turns his back.
"How could you do this to me?" He asks, his voice breaking. "Why are you doing this?"
She knows what he means. He's talking about her pursuit of him, the peace she's trying to lend.
"Because I care." She says, and it has as much finality and firmness as anything he's ever said to her. "You deserve someone who cares, Kylo."
She's careful to use the name he goes by now, the name he masquerades by. She wants him to know she sees him at his darkest, that it's him she's speaking to and not just his younger self.
"I don't," he says, and then repeats more insistently. "I don't."
His lightsaber ignites in his hand and he turns as if to threaten her, holding it up towards her face the same way he did in that forest, but she stands firm and stares him down. They both know the blade can't hurt her in the state they find themselves, or at least not worse than the burns she'd gotten when they'd first started sparring.
"Okay," she says, and as usual her answer surprises him. "What if you don't deserve it? What if you don't deserve someone who cares about you? It doesn't change the fact that I do care."
He freezes, stops, stares. She tries to give him time, but it seems to just pour out.
"The question of whether you're deserving doesn't change where we are," she says. "It doesn't change the fact that you still have a decision in front of you, and that you'll have that decision in front of you every day of the rest of your life." She hesitates and then, seeming to understand the crossroads they're at, blurts again, "What if we were on the same side?"
This time, she has a better understanding of what it means.
That question brings back flashes of her lips on his, of his fingers in her hair and hers on his back, of the solidness of her and the warmth she radiated in his arms. She's a sun and he's a moon. He has no light from himself, but through her—
"I love you," he blurts. There's no finesse in the way he says it, no plan. "And I hate it. I hate you."
What a paradox it is to hate someone because you love them.
"I know," she says gently. I know.
They stand there regarding each other. His lightsaber flickers off and he lowers his arm. He's caught off guard, unsure of what to do.
This time, it's her that steps forward, finds her way to him. He's so tall, she has to pull him down to her, but he doesn't struggle. She kisses first the three freckles on his right cheek near the scar, then second the length of his jaw, pressing closer and closer down his neck. She can feel his breath catch in his throat, can sense the moment his defenses completely drop and he's hers, if only for a few minutes.
She'll take it. It's progress.
She kisses him on his lips then, sweetly and too lightly for his taste in that moment. His fingers snake into her hair and he pulls her in closer, dives into her, devours her.
She is the Light.
...
The first visit after that, they both hesitate, unsure if their experience had actually just been a dream, a vision of longing stolen in seconds of sleep.
They reach for each other at the same time.
...
They enjoy three days of bliss, of shy touches, of stolen kisses, of peace pure and simple.
On the fourth day, he wakes up with an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. He can feel she's terrified, shocked, sickened, angry. When he sees her, she's crying, running, and when he calls her name, worried and understanding this isn't a usual war zone situation, the glare she sends him—
It shakes him to his core.
...
He sees her again a few hours later. She's tired, drained, sucked dry by only a short time passing. She's still crying softly, but it seems like she's trying to hide it. He reaches for her and she jerks away violently, like his touch burns her, marks her.
"How could you." She says, low in her throat, not even looking at him. "How the kriff could you."
He doesn't know what she's referring to. He stutters for words, to ask what she's talking about, but she doesn't let him have the opportunity.
"Leia's dying."
There's a lot she doesn't say. Because of you. Because of your war. Because of the choice you've made every day for the past five months. Because of your refusal to turn, to show mercy, to relent, to concede — to be worthy.
She doesn't refer to Leia as his mother.
And suddenly he understands that if he'd thought he was undeserving before, he's irredeemable now.
All he can manage is the beginning of his denial of responsibility before the connection is severed. He feels the loss of her suddenly, immediately, keenly.
The loss of his mother's presence follows soon after.
It's the emptiest he's ever felt, the most bewildered, the most drained.
He goes numb.
...
It was Hux. Frustrated by Kylo's absence and lack of drive to finish this pathetic war, Hux had taken over the strategic meetings, used his power to plan attacks. Kylo had stopped fighting, but Rey never had, the Resistance never had, and neither had Hux.
He'd planned the assassination carefully, knowing this could be the blow that crippled the Resistance once and for all.
When it's successful, he smiles with satisfaction and basks in his own glory.
Two hours later, he asphyxiates on his own windpipe for that very success, Kylo Ren standing in front of him with his arm outstretched, his hand throttling the air.
...
Rey never allows for an explanation. In this, as in other instances, she's steadfast in her sureness.
When it first happens, he holds onto a desperate hope that she'll realize what he was trying to say even if she refuses to see him, that she'll come back to him when she's ready. But he's taken aback by the blunt force of her anger. It lashes out at him from galaxies away, clawing at him when he tries to focus on war strategy or on his saber form in the absence of her presence. It lingers, grows over the following weeks. He's hit a switch in her, changed her, shaken something loose, unleashed it.
She feels betrayed by him, tricked. She believes he lulled her into peace, whether intentionally or not, and now she's lost mentors, friends, and maybe the war. The desperation turns her darker, more determined, more reckless, and unlocks pieces of herself that she'd previously believed never existed.
As time passes, he realizes she isn't going to let it go and, more obviously, that he doesn't deserve for her to. Even if it wasn't his decision to assassinate Leia, it was still his decision to continue waging the war in the first place. If it's his war, he's responsible for the outcomes. The death of his entire family; the overtaking and exploitation of worlds and planets inhabited by uninvolved creatures; Rey's changing.
After a few weeks, the bridge breaks completely and their tie is severed.
...
He doesn't see her again until their next That Day, the day of their unavoidable final confrontation, and on That Day he sees that her blade glows not with the blue of Obi-Wan or the green of Luke, but the purple she's chosen as her own emblem, the purple of those who've found the balance between the Light and the Dark.
...
Author's Note: I hated writing the second half of this chapter because I ship them so hard, but this is how I see their relationship realistically going before IX. I'm not predicting whether or not he'll turn, but I know they have to handle Carrie Fisher's death in the storyline somehow, and I suspect they're going to say she was assassinated in the opening crawl. Unfortunately, I don't foresee any potential relationship surviving the death of his mother.
Additionally, I think Luke was the last Jedi, regardless of how powerful Rey is in the Force. She might rebirth a different class of Jedi, but I think Luke is the last of the old order. The problem I've always had with the old order was their incomplete understanding of the Force and how it works, always focusing solely on the Light and on perfecting an emotionless, purely rational approach to life. But how amazing would it be if Rey developed the new order by understanding the balance between the two and going from there?
Anyway. Thank you for sticking with me through this ride! Let me know what you think about the ending and the story overall!